Earlier I wrote, regarding presenting users with a list of updates:
would your proverbial grandmother have been similarly helped by such a list?
mac_v replied:
Atleast they would know / remember that the last thing they did was an update,
I disagree. If they did a kernel update (your chosen example!) several weeks ago, and only just now rebooted their desktop machine, would they know that? How? They did a lot of other things in those intervening weeks. Similarly, if an update updates (and breaks) an infrequently used application, or breaks just one infrequently used feature of a regularly used app... any resulting new issue may very well not be immediately visible.
Or if the person is a bit more adventurous , can themselves search for the error...
Sure. We already support this kind of search for "what might have caused this". A log of which packages were updated when, under /var/log/apt/ , so they (either the user or someone helping them) can check on exactly what updates happened when. This logging already happens. Also, the system can use email sent by the auto updater to provide unobtrusive non-interrupting background "notification" of what was done, which is the approach used by the current, existing, functional, unattended-updates package in Jaunty. It's configuration UI could IMO be made a lot easier for novices, and perhaps its logs could be easier to read... but the necessary functionality is already there.
Updates not only in Ubuntu, in all OS *CAN* cause problems...
True; handling updates (whether automated or not) is a matter of risk assessment. See my earlier response to ScottK for some ideas on migrating the work of doing such assessments to people with more likelihood of doing those assessments well, and away from a novice end user. If you are advocating the outright rejection of any kind of automated updates, simply because too many Ubuntu updates *actually* cause problems (not "can", but actually *do*), then clearly you just identified an area in which it would be rather beneficial to our users to make some improvements!
Again I ask: can we avoid using anecdotes, and instead find good statistics on how big an issue this "the update broke my system" really is, to guide the discussion? And if those stats do show high rates of breakage, then I really think the correct solution is putting some more effort into better QA of Ubuntu updates, along with providing a measure of automated update suitability -- not dismissing update automation per se as being too error-prone.
Jonathan